1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to location enabled services and applications. More particularly, aspects are directed to personalized user location tags.
2. Description of Related Art
Location-based services and applications are becoming more and more popular as the number and types of portable electronic devices increases. Devices such as mobile telephones, PDAs and laptop/palmtop computers may be used indoors and outdoors in one location or while on the go.
User may let their friends and families know what they are doing and where they are at with any number of applications, such as with texting or via Google's Latitude service. The user's location can be “published” in different ways. For instance, the user's location may be identified as a set of latitude/longitude coordinates, as a place mark on a map, or given as a street address.
The location of the user's device may be found with a number of different technologies. One such technology is satellite-based location using the Global Positioning System (“GPS”). Another location technology employs triangulation among multiple cell towers or WiFi access points to estimate the device's position. A further location technology is IP geocoding. In this technique, a device's IP address may be mapped to a physical location.
Depending on the level of granularity, the published location may be a specific point such as a street address, a town, a state, etc. If the granularity is coarse, multiple users may be represented by the same location. For instance, if there are several users in San Francisco, then a status showing “San Francisco” for each of them doesn't convey much meaningful information. In another situation, the published location may be too invasive. For example, the user may not want to publish his or her actual location (e.g., street address or even city).